


My Heart Is Overcome

by stonecoldhedwig



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Godric's Hollow, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Just a shit tonne of metaphors, Purple Prose, jily
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-11
Updated: 2020-12-11
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:54:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28001244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stonecoldhedwig/pseuds/stonecoldhedwig
Summary: One morning in early October, 1981, Lily Potter reflects on her life.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Comments: 11
Kudos: 25





	My Heart Is Overcome

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this, and inspiration for it, come from the song "October" by Gray.

_"We’ll never be able_  
_to treasure life enough._  
_When death comes,_  
_My heart is overcome."_

  
Final moments so often go unnoticed until it is too late. No one thinks that the hurried _love you!_ called between mouthfuls of coffee on the way out the door in the morning will be the last one. No one expects that hands brushing over the sugar bowl or hips bumping in the bathroom will be the final refrain of a relationship, a life. Despite all the fragility of the world, human hearts have some endless capacity to hope that life will simply continue unchanged; and in hoping, no one anticipates an ending. 

Well, almost no one. 

Lily had known it would be the final time she hugged her mother. She had taken particular care to memorise the scent of her mother’s perfume; if she squeezed her eyes shut, the smell of roses and geranium whispered in some secret place, a quiet part of her mind. She had wished for a kind of flesh memory, a way of imprinting upon her body the feeling of her mother’s arms around her. Lily wanted an eternal testament written into skin and bone that Rose Evans had lived—had taken up space upon the earth, had carried ancient stardust in the atoms of her being, had transposed the whispered molecules of her ancestors’ dreams into a rich and beautiful life. Lily wanted the world—her world, and her mother’s world—to know that Rose had been more than the shadow of her former self that lay in that hospice bed when Lily said goodbye. Rose had spent a lifetime loving fiercely, no matter the cost. 

Love was what Lily had learned from her mother. It dictated Lily’s life. It was for love that she had said goodbye to her mother and vanished, disappearing from the world where she imagined nurses would gossip about the daughter who never visited anymore. It was for love—love of the little boy sleeping in his crib upstairs in this cottage that still didn’t feel like home. 

It had been for love of James, too. Lily loved James—loved him with every fibre of her being. He was the soft song of her soul, the answer to her quiet questions to the universe. He’d offered to let her stay with her mother, to take Harry and go into hiding alone so that Lily could hold Rose’s hand as she slipped into the unknown light. Lily wouldn’t countenance it. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—be parted from James, because he was the soft edges of candlelight on a dark night, the gentle space in which she was safe. James and Harry were the way she understood the world and there was nothing, no power at all, that would have kept them apart. 

So, they went. They went away, wrapped themselves in secrets and isolation and hid themselves in the little cottage in Godric’s Hollow. It was hard for James—harder for him, really, than for Lily. Withdrawal was the best way for Lily to deal with her grief, to cope with the chasm that had appeared in her heart. James found the isolation far more difficult; he longed to walk the streets freely that he had known all his life, so close to his childhood home at Peverell Hall, nestled just above the village. He needed his friends, his brothers—he missed Sirius and Remus and Peter like one might miss a limb. He was grieving, too, but for something that hadn’t happened yet; the death of some high ideal. 

Lily thought about her mother and about James’ preemptive grief as she tiptoed down to the kitchen, the tiles cold beneath her bare feet. The cat followed her, mewling for breakfast and for Lily to pick her up and hold her against her chest. It was a cool, quiet morning. September had come to its close and there had been no Indian summer that year; it was a precocious autumn. The leaves on the trees seemed to have turned sharp, acid yellow almost overnight, and Lily knew as she looked out the kitchen window and filled the kettle that they would drop from the branches soon. Autumn was a passing bell; winter, a death toll waiting to ring. 

Lily had made her peace with death. Really, it had been years—ever since she stepped onto the Hogwarts Express aged eleven, she had learnt that life was not guaranteed. She liked to think that knowing about Voldemort, and growing up to fight him had given her an appreciation for life. Gratitude, that’s what she hoped she had. Gratitude, or appreciation, or dare she say it, love, for the life that she had been given. As she set the kettle on the stove, Lily wondered how she and James had come to live this strange life. It was a half-life, a pause between inhaling and exhaling, the veil between the world and the beyond. Yet, she was still grateful for it. Grateful for the heartbeat thudding in her chest and the freezing tiles beneath her feet; grateful for the slumbering baby upstairs whose whole being wrote joy into Lily’s soul; grateful for the man who she knew would join her soon to sip coffee in the quiet morning before the baby woke. 

Lily was right in her prediction. Moments later, she sensed James’ presence in the room before he spoke. The energy always changed when she and James were in a room together; there was some invisible binding that linked them together, a fire that burned warm and bright. She looked up from the stove and smiled at the sight of him approaching her—hair mussed from sleep, glasses wonky, pyjama trousers a little short in the leg as they grazed his ankles. 

“Good morning,” James smiled. 

He slipped his hands around Lily’s waist, the sensation sending those familiar sparks of delight up her spine. They had been through so much—were going through so much—and yet James’ hands on her waist made Lily feel like they were teenagers again, on their first date to Hogsmeade. That cool day in the October of their seventh year had been heavenly. James had been far more charming than she’d expected him to be, far wittier over their first butterbeers of the day than Lily anticipated. She supposed it was because he was someone she'd thought the worst of until the latter days of their sixth year. James had been irritating, arrogant, an annoyance—hadn’t she once called him a toerag? He’d been a boy who seemed to teeter constantly on the edge of desperation.

Only, it had been a young man who sat across from her that day, not a boy. He’d been confident, but not arrogant; he’d made Lily laugh until her sides hurt, and listened thoughtfully as the whispered confession of her father’s death slipped from her lips. Lily had fallen in love with him as a result of that conversation. Or, she mused, perhaps it was not that she fell in love with James Potter on a bright October day in 1978. Perhaps it was that Lily realised she had loved him already, and loved him still, and would love him forever, in the sort of eternal way that had apparently been obvious to everyone but her. 

Lily was brought back to the present moment by the sudden absence of James’ hands from her sides. He had stepped away, towards the wonky little backdoor and the calendar that was hanging there. Sometimes it seemed like an utterly pointless thing; there was nothing that filled the blank squares. James liked it, though—he liked to tick off each day as they happened. He needed to mark that passing of time. 

James took the calendar off the wall. He turned the page over, revealing the new month’s photograph of a robin flying in and out of a window, perching on the sill to chirp silently. He smiled, and lifted the calendar, rehanging it on the small nail in the wall. 

“October 1981,” he said with a resolute sigh, and turned back to look at Lily. “Where do you think we’ll be this time next year?” 

“Somewhere better,” replied Lily, smiling and pulling her cardigan a little closer around her. “Somewhere where Harry can run around and we won’t be looking over our shoulders. Somewhere with space for a baby.”

James’ face lit up, and he grinned. “You have plans you’re not telling me about, Mrs Potter?”

They moved at the same time; gentle steps towards one another, unhurried. They were, after all, an inevitability—what was the rush? Lily knew deep down that she and James were a moment of cosmic predetermination. They were the shore and the tides, tied together, bound in a cycle of keening and yearning for each other until the point of beautiful collision. 

James bent his head to kiss her, slow and sweet. Lily could have stayed there forever, lips against his, the feel of his steady heartbeat beneath her fingertips. Her eyes only opened at the sound of the kettle whistling from the other side of the room. James’ grey eyes looked back at her, still clouded with sleep and with something else—some unspoken longing, some quiet desire, some love. 

“I have so many plans,” Lily whispered against James’ lips, “so many plans with you.” 


End file.
